


The heart that comes to know its war

by lbmisscharlie



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Deception, F/F, Red Room, Spycraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 09:34:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5622484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hold your objective in mind and suit your tactics to the circumstances at hand.</p>
<p>Thus: Dottie Underwood, flustered, with her dressing gown just slipping off her shoulders, hands wringing in front of her, gaze anything but direct, standing in Peggy Carter’s doorway. Adaptation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The heart that comes to know its war

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kathryne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathryne/gifts).



It could be dangerous to let them think. She’d seen it: saw Ljuba come back from a job, thinking she knew better than Dvornikov, thinking she could take it right to Nikolayev herself. Saw Ljuba argue; saw Dvornikov snap her neck.

So: don’t think, adapt. 

Dvornikov, in an American accent: “If a guy needs killin’, you kill him. He needs kissin’, you kiss him.”

Hold your objective in mind and suit your tactics to the circumstances at hand.

Thus: Dottie Underwood, flustered, with her dressing gown just slipping off her shoulders, hands wringing in front of her, gaze anything but direct, standing in Peggy Carter’s doorway. Adaptation.

“Dottie? Is everything alright?” Peggy’s feigning sleepiness; the yawn she gives doesn’t reach her eyes. She’s still emerging from a world where her enemies wear uniforms or lurk deviously in the shadows; she doesn’t yet know that that isn’t how the world works anymore. 

“Gee, Peggy, I’m sorry, I was hoping you’d still be up. But I’ve gone and broken up your beauty sleep – I mean, it’s not like you need it, Peggy, I mean, gosh, I only – but I’ll just go, it’s nothing, it’s just –” she babbles, knowing that if she keeps at it, it will work on Peggy as well as it does on men: be exasperating enough that they’ll do anything to get you to stop. “It’s just –” she looks at the ground, then back up to Peggy. “I’m awful homesick, is the truth, and I thought – you’re far from home, too, so you probably know what it’s like, and I just thought maybe you’d want to –” She trails off, leaving it open. 

Peggy’s first instinct, always, is to push, in starting fights and refusing friendships, and she’s begun to edge the door closed. Dottie takes a step closer, pulls a bag from her pocket. “I brought bon-bons,” she says, and she must hit just the right note of determined conviviality, because Peggy sighs and lets the door fall open.

++

“Didja leave someone back home?” Dottie cajoles, bumping her shoulder to Peggy’s. Peggy curls in on herself, as she knew she would, leaving Dottie open to say, all blustering apology, “Oh, gosh, Peggy, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. You lost someone, didn’t you?” Her hand is on Peggy’s thigh, and they’re on Peggy’s bed, and she’s quite pleased that she had decided to make Dottie someone who blunders her way forward and always says too much, so that when she leans forward, her mouth in Peggy’s space, and says, “Gosh, I’m a dolt, I didn’t even think,” Peggy actually comforts her.

She leaves her hand on Peggy’s thigh. She thinks about nights back home, about the pinching brusqueness of another’s hands on her body – Anya’s or Svetlana’s – of crowding together in tiny, narrow cots and finding ways to claim space. She’d seen what men and women do together: Loktev and the girl from the dairy, his pants around his ankles, his bovine grunts. Nothing like their silent little competitions at night: who would make noise first; who would sleep happily; who would get the scant space at the edge of the bed with their toes in the cold air. It was nice, too, though, the petting and the sticky-warm way they’d fall asleep pressed hard and close.

But it’s nothing like the way Peggy puts her hand over Dottie’s, holding it there, against her thigh. “I don’t like talking about it,” she says, almost coldly. “And I think,” she says slowly, leaning closer, “that it’s not what you want me thinking about right now at all.”

She kisses Dottie, and Dottie is startled for a moment because it usually takes longer with women, and she hadn’t thought Peggy could surprise her. And then: adaptation. She kisses back, in the starved little half-pecks Dottie might give and thinks – no – strategizes – no – feels Peggy’s hand on hers, Peggy’s legs spreading – plans – no – moves forward – yes. 

Peggy was wrong, at least a little: it is the Captain they want, Peggy’s drowned lover; Peggy never mentions him, and the only remnant she could find in Peggy’s room is a single photograph, pressed flat and tucked away. Did she touch him like this, her hand on his thigh, her hip against his? Did they strip down in the cold nights on the front? She’d envied those people who could find such solace, who could forget the angry gnaw of their starving stomachs, the cold-clenched ache of their limbs, in a moment’s pleasure.

But then, Russia is colder than France, than Germany, than England. 

Peggy pulls back, her skin golden and her lips pink in the soft yellow light of the bedside table. Dottie thinks enough to say, “Gosh,” breathy and surprised; Peggy laughs. “Can we do that again?” Dottie says, and presses her hand against the yielding flesh of Peggy’s thigh (soft skin, femoral artery, weak spot). 

Her grin spreads even as she leans in, kisses Dottie again, lifts her hand from Dottie’s to grasp the edge of her dressing gown lapel. Underneath, her nightie is cotton, square-necked, with an edge of embroidered ribbon: virginal and girlish. When Peggy pushes, her dressing gown falls away, leaving her collarbone, her shoulder, and the slight upper rise of her breast bare. She is not cold: New York is rarely cold like her body remembers: yet her skin prickles. 

Peggy’s thumb presses hard against her nipple; Dottie’s hand drifts to Peggy’s neck, where it turns to kiss her, and it is taut and strong and she can feel her wet swallow against her fingertips. All this flesh, all the blood beneath it. Peggy bites down on her lower lip and Dottie gasps; Dottie, good Midwestern girl, gasps and digs her fingers into Peggy’s thigh, and squeezes her legs together and feels heat between them.

Peggy doesn’t speak, but she pushes: not lingering, hesitant, or slow. Dottie yields, and yields: pulls the neckline of her nightie down, so Peggy’s mouth can press against a nipple; her legs spread under Peggy’s hand; her body lowered to the bed. Peggy unties Dottie’s dressing gown, lifts the skirt of her nightie, pulls aside her panties: lifts away but does not quite uncover all that Dottie, good Midwestern girl, assembles around her. Kneeling between her thighs, Peggy’s fingers slide up the valleys of Dottie’s cunt, more delicate than Dottie expected from this brusque-edged woman, from this soldier who fights with blunt instruments and sheer frustrated anger.

Is this too much? Her mind scrambles back to mission objectives, and feels them slip further away with each stroke of Peggy’s fingers. Not gone, though: fragility and intimacy can be utilized to such satisfying conclusions.

Between her spread-open legs, Peggy grins. Then her mouth, warm and soft, is spreading wide Dottie’s soaking cunt, and there’s no way she’s going to be saying anything with her mouth like that.

Dottie spreads her legs a little wider, twists her fingers in Peggy’s hair, holds her close. Adaptation.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Muriel Rukeyser's "Letter to the Front":
>
>> The heart that comes to know its war  
> When gambling powers try for place  
> Must live to wrestle for a place  
> For every burning human care:
>> 
>> To know a war begins the day  
> Ideas of peace are bargained for,  
> Surrender and death are bargained for -  
> Peace and belief must fight their way.


End file.
